"No more rain, no more rain!" he says with a laugh on this crystal-clear day in an unusually wet growing season. "The tomatoes need sun!"

The Angel Family Farm off Indiana Road represents a new twist in the fertile Black Dirt region. Like the legions of Polish immigrants who came to till the soil generations ago, a new wave of immigrants, some Latino, some Asian, has arrived with the same dreams and tenacity.

Angel and his wife, Ana, are among several farmers in the mid-Hudson region to arrive via a New York City farmer education program. It was through the New Farmer Development Project of NYC Greenmarket that the Angels, who still call Brooklyn home, arranged to lease a plot of the Black Dirt seven years ago.

"We started with 3 acres," Crisostomo Angel, 42, recalls on a recent morning. "We had no equipment. Nothing. We did everything by hand."

And his hands weren't all that experienced.

"I worked in restaurants; I managed a store," Angel said. "My wife grew up on a farm in Mexico, but this was a big change, a very big change for me. It was what she always wanted, and I was a little scared. But she always said, 'We're going to make it; we're going to make it.'"

He smiles when recalling his first trips hauling produce to Greenmarkets in Queens and Brooklyn.

"I had a Geo Metro, and I'd have 30 cases in the car, and more on top, on the roof," he said. "People laughed when they saw me coming."

Angel's confidence grew along with the first plantings.

"It was a very good year, and by our second year, we had our first tractor," he said, pointing to a shiny John Deere parked nearby.

The farm has since expanded to a dozen acres, which the Angels first leased and now own. They also have two box trucks for deliveries. The couple beams when showing off a second new John Deere tractor equipped with a payloader.

A trailer they installed on the property doubles as an office and temporary home when the family's not in Brooklyn.

The Angels met in Brooklyn after coming from Mexico when he was 15 and she was 17. They have four children: Lizbeth, 22, attends Brooklyn College and handles the farm's accounting and computer needs, Henry, 19, makes deliveries and goes to the Greenmarkets when he's not studying at the College of Staten Island. The youngest, Jennifer, 11, and Maria, 8, help out on weekends.

Ana Angel helps subsidize the farm for now by running a child-care business in Brooklyn four days a week. That helped see the family through the damage wrought by back-to-back tropical storms Irene and Lee.

The family grows more than 50 varieties of produce to guard against losing an entire crop to a single storm.

"Everything we grow, we grow in a small amount," Ana Angel says. "We want to harvest everything."

Crisostomo Angel points to verdant rows of 2,000 staked tomato plants. Ana Angel leads a visitor toward a 600-head lettuce patch. That's about how many heads they sell weekly. Zucchini flowers are popular at the markets these days, too, as is fresh-picked corn.

Ana Angel doesn't hesitate when asked what she foresees in five years.

"I want a permanent building with a commercial kitchen," she says of plans to cook a portion of the crops into a variety of dishes for sale. That's called value-added agriculture, a step farmers use these days to boost the bottom line with prepared foods like preserves, salsas and breads.

For the Angels, there's no turning back.

"We had no water at first, and we still have no electricity," Ana Angel says, "but I feel lucky. We have the trailer, and I feel proud. We did what we had to do."

jwalsh@th-record.com

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.